


quietly on that beach

by feuertatze



Series: here's what happens when you die [1]
Category: Julie and The Phantoms (TV)
Genre: Angst, Bad Parents, Car Accidents, Character Study, Death, Fights, Friendship, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hopeful Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Music as a coping mechanism, POV Second Person, Pre-Canon, Reggie-centric (Julie and The Phantoms), Vomiting, graphic descriptions of lethal food poisoning, in which reggie thinks he knows dying, mostly - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-07
Updated: 2020-11-07
Packaged: 2021-03-08 19:08:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27441703
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feuertatze/pseuds/feuertatze
Summary: "Here’s what happens when you die. It’s dark and lonely and cold. It’s yelling and slammed doors. It’s the voices rising in a rhythm as unsteady as the waves of the stormy sea outside.Here’s what being dead feels like. It’s the silence almost being worse, the absence of hatred tangible, turning into acid in your throat. It’s the waves breaking at the shore, arriving quietly on the beach, their gentle appearance masking the death they carried just minutes ago, pressing the fishing boat against the sharp cliff."Reggie thinks about home.
Relationships: Alex & Bobby | Trevor Wilson & Luke Patterson & Reggie
Series: here's what happens when you die [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2004823
Comments: 3
Kudos: 47





	quietly on that beach

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [don't look down](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27042058) by [Quecksilver_Eyes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quecksilver_Eyes/pseuds/Quecksilver_Eyes). 



> listen, i can't stop thinking about this show.
> 
> title from "the last great american dynasty" by taylor swift

Here’s what happens when you die. 

It’s dark and lonely and cold. It’s yelling and slammed doors. It’s hoping your little sister is already asleep, despite your better judgement. It’s tossing and turning and feeling the minutes tick by. It’s the voices rising in a rhythm as unsteady as the waves of the stormy sea outside.

Here’s what being dead feels like.

It’s the silence almost being worse, the absence of hatred tangible, turning into acid in your throat. It’s the waves breaking at the shore, arriving quietly on the beach, their gentle appearance masking the death they carried just minutes ago, pressing the fishing boat against the sharp cliff. It’s hearing the muffled weeping behind the paper-thin wall, your hope in vain.

Reviving you is an age-old game, electric shocks crashing through your veins. The riff flows, untangling feelings, cold dread and silent fear and mundane horror, unearthing hope. Laughing, jovial fighting, teasing, playing together - deep down, your heart starts beating again, just for a few hours. Just until you come home again, open the front door to shouts over trivialities.

They know where to apply the current, how to make you come alive, because they share your pain. They know what it’s like to die. 

  
You remember this when one of them breaks down crying, barely standing over his guitar, scraps of lyrics on his lips. You clutch onto them for him, hold him through the sobs, press your lips on his hair, desperately whisper the promises of all your shared dreams. You remember this when he lays curled up tightly on the air mattress each night, phantom chords hummed too quietly to reach even your ears.

You remember this when one of them pads barefooted across your bedroom floor one night, eyes averted as you change. You catch his fall, even as you can’t seem to fill your lungs with enough oxygen, an ache deep in your bones. You remember this when you hug and fetch tissues and shush with dry, burning eyes, your heart sore, a sour taste in your mouth, because yet another of you lost their parents tonight.

You remember this when one of them is singing again, patchy grief sticky like crude oil on his hands, on his guitar, coating his smile. The melody sounds to you like leaking fuel, a burning engine, the wrong side of the car facing the sky, while the lyrics tell you about escape and poison, and you hold tight onto his shoulders when he has to stop, heaving. You remember this when you see his misfitted shards, sharp at the edges, held together by desperation and music, glue still drying.

Here’s where you’re wrong. 

Dying is more painful, sharp and crashing, bursts of hot and cold, your body trying to rid itself of its poison. 

But then again, it's exactly and nothing like how dying felt before. It's sirens and it's yelling and the murmurs from the sidewalk almost sound like the sea when it's storming. It's desperately sucking in air, hoping, hoping, hoping the next breath will finally carry enough oxygen for you to whisper a plea of unfulfilled promises, another promise of which you can taste its falseness. It's your stomach turning on itself, nothing but burning acid and a faint resemblance of what might once have been meat in your mouth. 

This time, dying is slower than before. The paramedics shout across where you lie, your parents shout over dinner and next to the Christmas tree and through the wispy walls of your childhood house. It’s nothing new. You hear yourself scream. 

You know what it’s like to die after all. 

  
Here’s something else you’re wrong about.

Your friends, your love, your band dying with you stings, deep, painful. It’s hearing the crying faintly through the walls, it’s seeing the red-rimmed eyes of the twelve-year-old shadow of what was once a girl. It’s the sting of your hands which your guitar betrays you with when you escape, been away from home a little too long.

There are arms around you, your tee-shirt slowly soaking through with tears and you remember the sea and its waves. You think you remember the sea and the waves. Do they belong to the sea? Or were they sound waves, carried not from the open sea to the shore but from the living room to their rooms? 

There is sobbing, in the dark.

It’s like home again, but home never had those warm, tight arms around you. It sounds like one of your friends, the arm around your shoulders feels like another one of them. Where is the last one, you briefly wonder, before the dark drowns out everything else again. 

You distantly wonder about home. What did home ever even mean? Was there ever one that wasn’t the brown curls and cheeky smiles - the dramatic drum rolls and nervous hugs - the terrible fashion sense and the laugh that never failed to cheer you up? 

Your home, no, your _house_ was always only the wind howling around it, almost in harmony with the stumbling chaos in five-four of your mind. 

You think about the page in your notebook titled “Home Is Where Your Horse Is”, lines scribbled out and written again, chords in the margins, your emotions poured out into the rough attempt at a song, ever not the natural songwriter. The punchline title is a distraction from the raw edges of yourself wrapped up in a song that your friends would cut themselves on if they ever saw beyond the private joke and the southern slang you tried so hard to rid yourself of in Middle School.

Home has never been a place for you. It’s people and the sensation of your beating heart. If your friends feel alone, get lost, leave you, your home breaks into a thousand cracks. If it wasn’t so dark, you could look down and see the red stains from where you cut your hands on the shards, scrambling to fit them together again, just barely fitting them before your heartbeat stops again.

It feels like an eternity of stasis and like a panicked, frantic heartbeat all at once. Then it stops and there is light again. 

There is screaming, again. But the screaming comes from a girl with wild curls and overgrown slippers and suddenly, nothing is the same anymore.

Except it still is. It’s you and two of your best friends and a new friend and music, _so much music._ The warm California air shines on your skin again, and suddenly you _are_ again.

Finally, here’s something you knew: Death doesn’t seem to stick around for you. Dying is painful, but the shock of the electric impulses to your heart makes up for it. And what comes after - music, joy, lightness and seagulls screeching

**Author's Note:**

> so i read "don't look down" by Quecksilver_Eyes and couldn't help myself. check their fic out, it's fantastic! (linked as 'inspired by')  
> there will be a follow-up for alex which is like 65% written, possibly ones for luke and bobby as well. 
> 
> as usual thanks to awip for the emotional support, i'd run through walls for you, etc.


End file.
